| Hinde |
Hello, I’m Hinde Lamrani, the International Search Strategist and SME within RWS Moravia. My master’s were in ecommerce and international online marketing, but I specialized in SEO and, for the past eight years, worked within the localization industry.
So, as you know, global businesses have to make sure all their online assets are findable and visible online in their target markets globally. Today, we’re talking about something that is important to have in your content—to score good points with Google—called “E-A-T.” It stands for “Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.” Google made it clear in its Search Quality Evaluator guidelines that these do affect the rankings in the search results pages, especially for what Google calls “Your Money or Your Life” pages, or YMYL.
Today, we invited an expert in the field of search, and in the sub-field of E-A-T, Lily Ray. Lily is the SEO Director at Path Interactive. Lily also was nominated Best Female Search Marketer of the Year in 2017 by Search Engine Land. I will let Lily introduce herself. |
| Lily |
My name is Lily Ray. I’m the director of SEO at an agency called Path Interactive, based in New York City. So, I lead the team of about 15 different SEO professionals at my agency and we work across dozens of different clients in different categories. So, one of the things that myself, what I focus on—and kind of as a result what the team is focusing on in the agency—and a lot of the clients that we’re working with, is what’s been happening in the past couple of years with Google’s algorithms, which have taken an interesting turn, kind of in turn with what’s happening with world events and misinformation. Google’s really been prioritizing what they call a “good E-A-T content.” So, that’s Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.
And beginning about August 1st of 2018, if not a little bit sooner, we did see that Google started to incorporate, really, this emphasis on E-A-T into what it means to be a high-quality and high-ranking website. And this is particularly true for industries like health, finance, legal, political, what Google calls “Your Money Your Life” types of content. So, that’s been one of my key areas of focus over the past couple of years and something that I think it’s very important for businesses to pay attention to. |
| Hinde |
Google is working towards relevancy for the user—that is the main goal. Google would actually serve that local user information that is relevant to that person, to his location, to his language. However, most of them are more interested in what’s happens on the page, the content, the keywords, all of that stuff.
And I feel that this topic of E-A-T is really interesting because they need to understand that authoritativeness, trustworthiness and expertise are a major, major, element that they need to actually pay attention to. How can you actually, say, convince a global brand that they need to pay attention to this for other markets, not only the home market? |
| Lily |
Yeah. So, Google is incorporating E-A-T as one of its primary consideration factors, in all versions of Google. It’s not just, you know, google.com or google.co.uk. It’s something that they care about with the quality of search results across the board internationally. So, I do think that it’s absolutely worth focusing on it for that reason, but generally speaking, the things that we recommend doing to improve E-A-T involve, like, disclosing aspects of the brand and of the people who work at that brand—and things that make them trustworthy and convey to the user why there are authorities or why they’re experts, or why the users should feel good about, like, making a purchase on that website or, you know, getting in touch with the brand or things like that. So, almost in every case, the things that we recommend to improve E-A-T are universally good practices that brands should be implementing regardless of who their audience is, where their audience is.
So, I think from that angle, it’s really important, but when it does get into the territory of, like, internationalization of SEO, what can happen is a lot of the times brands want to do it, kind of quickly and in some cases, like, cheaply, or, like, not in a way where the content truly resonates with the person reading it in, whatever language and region they’re in. And I do think that that has the risk of decreasing the perceived E-A-T on your website, just because when Google can tell something, for example, has been auto-translated or auto-generated, that’s not expert content. So, it’s really important to think about not only internationalization of your content, but also making sure that you’re being perceived as trustworthy in those different regions. |
| Hinde |
That’s true. That’s true. Other aspects that I found, personally, for example: Some big brands wouldn’t pay attention to claiming their business on Knowledge Graph for other locations. Do you have anything to say about that? Any recommendations? |
| Lily |
Yeah. I think, whenever you have the opportunity to claim anything on Google, whether it be your Knowledge Graph, Google My Business, any other like publisher portals—like, all the tools that they make available to webmasters and the publishers—you should leverage all of them because almost always there’s a place to provide more information to Google about who your brand is. And I always recommend that people fill out every possible field that they can. We don’t exactly know how Google uses all these data points or if they use them, but the thing about Google is that they collect as much data as possible about a given entity.
So, the more you can provide them with information about your brand, whether that be, you know, different international versions or, you know, like Google My Business and different locations or different regions, the more you can optimize that claim that, tie it all together, make sure all the information is accurate—I think the better that your company will perform. |
| Hinde |
There was lots of questions about: Is my business classified as one of those Your Money or Your Life websites or not? Do you have an idea how, actually, Google classifies those? Like, for example, if a hair salon’s website is giving advice about using some products, would they be perceived as an expert or are they just, you know, talking about something they don’t know about, if that product could actually harm your health? It could, you know, be parts of a health issue or something or, I mean, it’s not always about the experts of, you know, finance or banking or retirement, like, very important aspects of life. It could be just like a reference to a product or something. Would this be also included in the YMYL? |
| Lily |
Yeah. So, Google doesn’t clearly define each category that’s considered Your Money Your Life. The way I see it, I think there’s a spectrum. So, I think that if you write about, like, cancer treatment or having a heart attack or something else, like, that’s pretty much as YMYL as it gets, or maybe like right now with the elections and news, Google really, really cares about Your Money Your Life, and things like coronavirus, obviously, as well. But then, you know, you can have a blog where you write about something casual, like you’re building guitars, or, like, just doing some type of hobby. And Google does say in the search quality guidelines pretty clearly that you’re allowed to have expertise on whatever it is that you are an expert on.
So, you could be an expert on baking chocolate chip cookies, because you’ve been doing that for 20 years and that’s what you do. Like, that’s perfectly fine and they can consider you an expert in that capacity, but then it starts to become tricky when you claim to be an expert on heart attacks when you’ve never been to medical school.
They have different levels of scrutiny that they apply to different categories, and I think that they’re not gonna get into, like, whether the hairstylist really has the proper credentials to write about doing hair. It’s more, like, when you’re providing real advice that could impact people’s safety and security, that’s when they’re gonna really apply E-A-T the most. |
| Hinde |
Another thing I noticed that, for international markets, lots of the brands would have, like, a huge focus on their home markets and they get those authority links and everything and but for their international pages they just think of, okay, let’s just translate this and stick some keywords and that’s it. And those pages do suffer in the target markets because, you know, we have local competitors—they’re not necessarily the perceived competitors that the brand is actually thinking about. They could be local competitors, SERP competitors, who are ranking much higher, because they’re local, because they’re niche. It could be just one small company specializing in one of the products and killing it in the rankings for all aspects around that product. And they would be surprised because they have the authority of a big brand and they’re not ranking; their page is not ranking. The idea here is to convince them that they need to work on building the authority of their brand over there as well. And again, you know, links to that page. If it is perceived as quality content and local websites from that market are linking to it and talking about it, that should also help. It should be part of their strategy and not only translating. |
| Lily |
Absolutely, yeah. I think that it’s really important too, especially if you’re trying to target a local market or the keywords that you are trying to rank for are, like, geo-modified, or if Google determines that they should return localized results. In some cases, you don’t have to be targeting a keyword that contains the name of a city or a place for Google to determine that that’s a localized keyword. So, if you type, like, “plumber” or “contractor,” like, that’s all gonna be localized to where you’re searching from. So, in that sense, the ranking factors that matter most for those geo-modified queries tend to be the ones that show that you are a relevant local business in many cases, especially as it relates to ranking in Google My Business, Google Maps. So to your point, I do think, you know, if Google can see that all the competitors have relevant links from, like, local news publications or local community centers or organizations or charities or whatever the case may be, that’s a strong signal to them that that business or that page is relevant to that target audience.
Now, if you’re operating on a more, like, not geo-specific strategy, so maybe you just have a page of content with information on it that you’ve translated to another language, and theoretically speaking, if you’re using Hreflang tags, that should consolidate the link value that you’re getting from one version to the other versions or kind of share it, from what I understand; that’s what I’ve been told. I don’t know if it always works that way in practice, but if you are using Hreflang tags properly, then that’s a way to tell Google, like, we wanna pass this authority around. Depends on your implementation, but I always strongly encourage any brand that’s doing translations to make sure that each Hreflang is implemented correctly. |
| Hinde |
That’s correct. It plays a big role in, you know, showing the right results, the right pages to the right audience and the right language, of course. So, from an expertise perspective, Google is saying that who is responsible for the website is taken into consideration and also who created the content on the page also is taken into consideration from an expertise perspective. Do you recommend to businesses to choose a sort of niche, business expertise, and build that expertise, and build their content and build any assets, online assets, they put out there on the net—videos, Wikipedia pages, anything that goes out there around what they’re doing? Do you recommend that they create activities like this to build up their expertise in that niche? |
| Lily |
Yeah, absolutely. I think the more you can, like you said, carve a niche for yourself and show depth of expertise in that area, the better you’ll be able to perform for those topics. I actually worked with another SEO professional, named Bill Slawski, last week. He’s the expert in Google patterns and we published an article together that talked about this. So, Google basically looks at certain topics and then it starts to evaluate, like, who are the most authoritative domains on this topic and kind of draws from that list of authoritative sites for certain queries. So, I think it’s really important for Google to be able to tell what your website is an authority on.
So, one of the things I’ve seen in the past couple of years for a lot of sites that don’t perform well with these new Google core updates is that they don’t specialize enough in one area, or they’re trying to write about too many different topics. And, in many cases, they’ll add topics that are very Your Money Your Life. So, the same author might be writing about, you know, doing push-ups at the gym, but then they’re also writing about, like, five ways to prevent a heart attack and you can’t necessarily be an expert on both of those things, like, maybe you can, but, like, your author should really reflect the subject matter that they are truly experts on and credible on. |
| Hinde |
True. I feel that we need to talk about entities. It’s something that’s really, really growing. It’s not new, but it’s becoming kind of the basic for how Google and other search engines actually are understanding the human language. The machines try to understand the human language and they try to put relationship between words and entity associations, to understand exactly what the content is about, so they can return relevant results for the searcher. What can you explain to somebody who’s not in the SEO community about how entities work? |
| Lily |
Yeah. So, like you said, entities are most commonly found, if you wanna see from a Google standpoint and how they’re using this, and what they call the Knowledge Graph or on Knowledge Panels. So, when you search for a variety of different keywords, you’ll see Google return, in most cases, like a right sidebar on desktop—they use some other variations of how they display Knowledge Graph results—but, let’s say, you take like a piece of fruit or something like that, and you Google just the name of that fruit. You’ll notice this right sidebar where they have pictures of it—they have, you know, like the scientific name for it, how many calories it has, all these different data points about that piece of fruit—that’s Google’s Knowledge Graph. They have a Knowledge Graph Listings and entities, like you said, for, I believe, it’s a 500 billion facts about 5 billion entities in Google’s Knowledge Graph.
And I imagine that number just keeps growing and growing. It’s a lot. So, this is the primary way that we can see how they’re using entities. You can actually look up, if you type a Knowledge Graph search—there’s a couple of different tools that you can use to look up whether an entity is listed in their Knowledge Graph or not—but they are basically collecting data from all kinds of sources, not just the internet, but all the other places that Google can pull data from, and creating this master database of entities and all the possible attributes that are associated to them. |
| Hinde |
So, for someone who wants to make sure the information they’re putting out there on the Net is actually compliant to this type of logic, so that they make it so easy for the search engines to find their information, categorize it and work with it. What is your recommendation? |
| Lily |
So, there’s a few different ways to go about it. The primary way that SEOs tend to try to take control of Knowledge Graph information is through structured data, otherwise known as schema. So, making sure that your structured data reflects all the most relevant and accurate details about your business or whatever other entity you choose to mark up on your page. So, let’s say you have a creative work, like a book that you’ve published, or an article or a song or something like that, you can provide structured data that says: This is the name of the song, this is how long it is, this is who wrote it, this is what album it appears on. So, structured data can feed into Google in that way and other search engines as well.
And then there’s some other databases that Google pulls from that we know for a fact that they pull from, so things like Wikipedia, Wikidata, honestly, like, dozens of other websites that they use that have data about different entities. So, the more you can get your brands listed in those places and making sure that the content on there is accurate, the better you’ll perform. My friend, Jason Barnard, has a really awesome article about all the places that Google that pulls from to get data for the Knowledge Graph. He has a big list. So, I’d recommend checking that out. |
| Hinde |
Fantastic. Thank you, Lily, for all these recommendations for our audience. The other thing I wanted to discuss today: Let’s touch on the search quality evaluator’s guidelines from Google. How do you feel about them and do you think everybody who’s put in content out there needs to read them? |
| Lily |
Google published a video two or three weeks ago that specifically said everyone should read the Search Quality Guideline. It will make the web a better place, which I thought was a really bold statement. I do think if you’re working in SEO or content creation, and you care about traffic from Google, you should absolutely read the guidelines. There’s so much good information in there. It’s important to understand how they’re used, so that it’s not a guidebook of all the SEO-ranking factors; it’s just what Google considers to be high- and low-quality content. But when you start to look at the examples that they provide throughout the document, they actually linked to like real live webpages that you can look at. It gives you a really good understanding of their framework for what good content looks like. And it makes you think too, like you might have not necessarily thought to evaluate authors in the way that they do, but when you learn what they’re looking for, it really helps to inform your strategy. |
| Hinde |
So, this is something that SEOs and anybody working in content to sell to their internal stakeholders, something they should be looking into and taking into consideration and taking seriously anyways, right? |
| Lily |
Totally. I always encourage people to read it. It’s a very, very long document, but even just reading like 10 or 15 pages of it, you start to get a really good understanding of what Google is looking for with content quality. |
| Hinde |
How can we explain to our audience that they should be making this E-A-T a priority when they’re on a content strategy, whether it’s for the home markets or elsewhere? |
| Lily |
Yeah. So, like I said before, focusing on E-A-T is generally going to be consistent with just being, like, trustworthy and transparent and credible with your users. But I do think it’s important to understand what that looks like from an SEO standpoint. But, generally speaking, whenever I make an SEO recommendation that’s focused on E-A-T, the client—assuming that the client is a business that’s doing good things, because there’s plenty of companies out there that are trying to use shortcuts and just, like, cheat the system and things like that. So, E-A-T doesn’t work if you’re trying to use, like, short-term hacks or whatever, but if you are an authentic brand, it should be pretty consistent with what you’re doing already, but in some cases maybe you haven’t communicated those things properly on your website.
So, I would encourage your audience, anybody that’s listening, to do a little of research around E-A-T. I have a page on my website that’s, like, all the different things I’ve written and spoken about with E-A-T, and just incorporate those strategies into your content creation process. I think it can only help, not only from an SEOs standpoint, but it’ll also help with user engagement and conversions as well. |
| Hinde |
Thank you very much for joining us today. |
| Lily |
Anytime. Thanks so much for having me. |
